Racket2 Possibilities - <AUTHOR> https://groups.google.com/forum/#!msg/racket-users/HiC7z3A5O-k/XPR2wbSJCQAJ <comment><USER2> The best way to kill a good Lisp is to remove the parentheses.

The people who complain about parens are still going to ignore your language even after you remove the parens, and then the Lispers will ignore you too. See Dylan.

This debate is exasperating. It's like hearing people say "I'm not interested in that Ferrari because it has a manual transmission." The only response to which is a silent, cold stare.

<comment><USER3> It is a great shame that I can only give you one upvote, you have it exactly correct. Removing parents ruins Lisp languages.

That said, I consider Haskell to be a Lisp language. But, Haskell was designed from the ground up, from ML, to be as it is.

<comment><USER4> Why is Haskell a lisp? It is the first time I hear someone classifying Haskell in the "List Processing" family of languages, and although it does process lists I thought its main paradigma symbol and code representation goes in a complete different direction, more into pure function oriented programming.

<comment><USER2> When people say something "is a Lisp" that usually has little to do with list processing. It's about whether it inherits more from lambda calculus than from Turing machines.

<comment><USER5> Lisp literally stands for 'List Processor'. To claim that it has little to do with it, is really really strange. One of the main reasons to create Lisp was being able to compute with 'symbolic expressions', represented as linked cons cells in the form of lists...

McCarthy about Lisp:

===

As a programming language, LISP is characterized by the following ideas:

computing with symbolic expressions rather than numbers, representation of symbolic expressions and other information by list structure in the memory of a computer, representation of information in external media mostly by multi- level lists and sometimes by S-expressions, a small set of selector and constructor operations expressed as functions, composition of functions as a tool for forming more complex functions, the use of conditional expressions for getting branching into function definitions, the recursive use of conditional expressions as a sufficient tool for building computable functions, the use of lambda-expressions for naming functions, the representation of LISP programs as LISP data, the conditional expression interpretation of Boolean connectives, the LISP function eval that serves both as a formal definition of the language and as an interpreter, and garbage collection as a means of handling the erasure problem. LISP statements are also used as a command language when LISP is used in a time-sharing environment.

===

[http://jmc.stanford.edu/articles/lisp/lisp.pdf](http://jmc.stanford.edu/articles/lisp/lisp.pdf)

'lambda calculus' wasn't even explicitly mentioned. But he mentions s-expressions, list structure, multi-level lists, ...

<comment><USER2> The Lisp community has moved on from McCarthy's taxonomy. In McCarthy's day, there were two high-level computer languages (Lisp and Fortran) and now there are thousands. Today we have different notions of what constitutes a "Lisp- like" language and what doesn't. By McCarthy's strict definition, Clojure is not a Lisp because it doesn't use real cons cells. But I think most people nowadays would agree that Clojure belongs in the Lisp family more than in the Algol family.

Haskell has (very!) first-class functions and is even more naturally compositional than most "classical" Lisps. It feels to me like a Lisp with static typing, laziness, and automatic currying cleverly incorporated.

Likewise Javascript. Javascript feels like a Lisp to me because it has lexical closures. It gets in my way because its syntax and many other design choices are terrible, but it still feels like it descends from lambda calculus.

I guess my point is that whether a language is a Lisp or not can't be reduced to a simple list of bullet points.

<comment><USER5> Neither Clojure, Haskell nor Javascript are Lisp. Haskell and JavaScript are not even directly derived from Lisp.

Your idea of Lisp lacks any concrete features and suddenly all languages would be Lisp: Prolog, Haskell, ML, SML, Javascript, Java, ... all of them have sone form of functions.

This then is arbitrary. Lisp is a family of languages which share concepts and code. There are a number of concepts (you call it bullet points) which make a language a member of the Lisp family in a wider sense and it may not be that all members share all concepts, but MOST and the important ones,

Haskell for example is very very different from Lisp: syntax, semantics and pragmatics. There is no way one would consider Haskell a member of Lisp languages. Lisps are not statically typed, they are not lazy, they don't use currying, they are not side effect free, etc. If a languages has all these features at its core, it's not Lisp. Claiming that it is Lisp is just creating confusion. Give a student a Lisp book (say Peter Norvig's PAIP) and a Haskell compiler: nothing runs, the concepts and architectures are different, the development style, basically everything.

Pure Functional Programming has been split from Lisp decades ago in the 70s and 80s and we have now thousands of language camps (not just two: Fortran and Lisp). The core of Lisp is still the same:

List processing, dynamically typed, a specific form of evaluation, garbage collection, s-expressions with symbols, code represented as s-expressions, built-in code transformations over s-expressions, procedures are called functions, higher-order functions, eager evaluation, optional interpretation of code in the form of s-expressions, interactive development with read-eval- print-loops, etc etc.

From there new languages families have been forked or maybe only influenced: purely functional PLs (Haskell), logic languages (Prolog), object-oriented languages (Smalltalk, Self) and many others.

Smalltalk is also not Lisp, even though it got stuff like images, GC, blocks, interactive interface, and others via Lisp influence...

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Rather than discussing "not lisp syntax" I suggest reading the Honu paper, which is pretty neat:

[https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/812b/92f2fa587ff78d727c7495...](https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/812b/92f2fa587ff78d727c749528f5a6411ac0e2.pdf)

<comment><USER7> Cadence had a Lisp/Scheme with infix operators a long time ago. See [https://community.cadence.com/cadence_blogs_8/b/cic/posts/sk...](https://community.cadence.com/cadence_blogs_8/b/cic/posts/skill- for-the-skilled-what-is-skill)

<comment><USER6> Did you mean to link to another page? I don't see anything about infix operators on that one.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I am not a fervent Lisper, but dropping the parentheses will take me away from the times I do go to Racket, and just go back to SBCL or Gambit or Chicken Scheme. The article admits it is to try and win more share of users, but that is not a good reason for a predominantly academic language. I would even go to Haskell, which avoids success at all costs ;)

<comment><USER9> Ironically, I think most of Racket's popularity is _driven_ by its Lispiness. People want to get into this 'Lisp' stuff and everyone recommends Racket. I personally learned Racket because as a dumb teen Googled "how to become a hacker".

The first result was Eric Raymond's article How To Become A Hacker, which recommended learning Lisp. I looked into Lisps and ran into the book How to Design Programs which recommended the IDE DrRacket.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> I quite liked this proposal from a while ago: [http://shriram.github.io/p4p/](http://shriram.github.io/p4p/)

The idea is basically to remove implicit `(begin ...)` and then remove the trailing parentheses from many things.

For example:

```

(define (f x y) (* x y))

```

vs.

```

define (f x y) (* x y)

```

It works because now you can only have a single expression as the body.

Similarly you get the same kind of thing with many other forms that have `begin`.

It also proposes adding some new syntax for various things, replacing `begin` with `do` and a bunch of other stuff related to indentation. You can easily pick and choose which parts you like though and still get some benefit, which is what I like. And it is still homoiconic.

If I wanted a quick and dirty way of making lisp "more readable", then this is what I'd do.

I even created my own half-assed implementation[1] of this idea years ago (In JavaScript). Disclaimer, it's really messy and incomplete code from when I was just learning how to write parsers/lexers/etc. One other idea I implemented was the ability to mix infix and prefix expressions. I'm not sure if I still think it's a good idea, but it worked (it had to know whether a token could be interpreted as a binary operator ahead of time and it was a bit janky, but you could even add your own custom operators)

[1] [https://github.com/weskerfoot/JLambda/blob/7508af2c9dcc4db02...](https://github.com/weskerfoot/JLambda/blob/7508af2c9dcc4db0214853036201211d8fbd09cb/server/fib.jl#L1-L8)

</comment><comment><USER11> I trust M. Flatt to know what he's talking about but really the 'potential users 'argument has always been weak to my eyes (both in breadth and depth).

prefix nested parens are ultra generic, I bet those who don't like that won't like the genericity of the paradigm and idioms either, no matter how mainstream the syntax

</comment><comment><USER12> Dijkstra's last published thoughts on the merits of infix notation for associative operators come to mind[1]: "It made me realize why I like it so much for associative operators: it allows us to write p+q+r without being forced to choose between (p+q)+r and p+(q+r); in prefix notation, the choice between ++pqr and +p+qr would have been unavoidable."

This show the obvious merit of parenthesis for prefix notation, since then one can write (+ p q r). In essence, the + operator distributes over the operands.

[1] [https://www.cs.utexas.edu/users/EWD/transcriptions/EWD13xx/E...](https://www.cs.utexas.edu/users/EWD/transcriptions/EWD13xx/EWD1300.html)

</comment><comment><USER13> I'm not totally against Racket without parens, but to gain popularity this seems not to be the first action should be taken. Like IDE, tooling, libraries/ecosystem improvements.

For example, the documentation is really great, but Drracket is only good, not great. Probably good VSCode integration would help a lot, since not everyone is using Emacs for serious work.

<comment><USER14> Instead of moving to a new market, with more _potential_ users - but also with fierce competition - it makes more sense to stay where they are and invest in "being so good that they can't ignore you" by investing in quality, and that means outstanding tooling and ecosystem.

Recently somebody in HN also noticed the need for a "browser scheme" to take advantage of code and data being the same. That might be also an interesting path.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> RacketCon 2019 talk "State of Racket" by Matthew Flatt

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dnz6y5U0tFs&t=390](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dnz6y5U0tFs&t=390)

</comment><comment><USER16> Disclaimer: I work on Tree Notation ([http://treenotation.org/](http://treenotation.org/)), ([https://twitter.com/breckyunits/status/1153016840769007616](https://twitter.com/breckyunits/status/1153016840769007616)).

Prediction: In 10 years the most popular programming languages in the world will not use the current BNF or () style syntaxes but instead will use Tree Notation (with Racket like "Language Oriented Programming" on top), OR will use some other "black swan" syntax that I haven't seen, that is even better than Tree Notation...

I think we're all going to learn that syntax does indeed matter, once machines are writing most of the code.

I'm willing to give even odds for that bet, if there is some type of charity betting site that supports that sort of thing, if anyone disagrees. (Even if you don't disagree, it would be silly to not take that bet for even odds, given fewer than 500 people are actively using Tree Notation today).

<comment><USER17> > Prediction: In 10 years the most popular programming languages in the world > will not use the current BNF or () style syntaxes but instead will use Tree > Notation

Prediction: in 10 years the most popular programming languages will still be C, Java, Python, Javscript, C++ and C#

<comment><USER18> Correct! [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lindy_effect](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lindy_effect)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Serious question: Why do parens matter so much?

I read the post and all the comments here, where people are very adamant about their opinions on parens. It seems to me that while syntax is important, parens in this context is about as close to "just syntax" as we can get. Racket-sans-parens would still be Racket.

Am I missing something fundamental?

<comment><USER20> IMHO the main problem are macros. Macros in racket/scheme/lisp/clojure are very powerful. You have the complete language available to make any transformation you want.

The idea is that the language look like an AST written as a list of list, and the tools to write macros look like some pattern matching to transform lists of list into lists of list. (In spite they are not lists of list but syntax objects that have much more information.) (And you are not forced to use some subset of tools, you can write arbitrary code in the macros, but some tools make the common tasks easier.)

For example, to create a new macro that run some block of code n times, you can write

      (define-syntax-rule (repeat n boby ...)
        (for ([i n])
          body ...))

and now you can use that as if it is part of the language:

      (repeat 5
        (displayln "Hello, Word!")
        (displayln "</comment></comment><comment></comment><comment>"))

(Note that, you don't have to worry that the counter i in the macro will overwrite a variable i in the main part of the code.)

Nobody is sure where is the magic, but writing macros is easies because the code in the main program and the patterns in the macro look very similar.

It's more difficult to work with a language with more syntax. Is the code desugared before going to the macro? Can you use some sugared version inside the macros? Does the user have to learn the main sugared version of the language and then learn the desugared forms?

What if one of the "arguments" of the macro is an infix operator? How does it interact with the other operators?

What if you have two interoperable languages running side by side? Racket ships with something like 10 or 20 internal languages, and you can download 5 or 10 or 20 or 1000 more. And all of them are (somewhat) interoperable. So you can most of the time use the libraries written in one of them in the other. You can even share macros between languages.

What if you have two interoperable languages running side by side? What if you write a macro in the sugared language and try to use in the other, or vice versa? Does they work? How?

Nobody is sure about the details, but Matthew is optimistic that this is possible, and he is usually right.

<comment><USER21> At least in Julia, which is a Lisp-inspired language without s-expressions, what you have is a dual representation for all code [1] in which you can manipulate either directly on the normal infix notation with quote and unquote, which is good for code injection [2], or in the s-expression-like representation (Surface syntax AST) [3] in which you have the full control over the structure but you have to deal with a different syntax. Using the s-expression-like is more powerful, but for the function user it doesn't really matter which you use.

[1] [https://docs.julialang.org/en/v1/manual/metaprogramming/inde...](https://docs.julialang.org/en/v1/manual/metaprogramming/index.html#Expressions- and-evaluation-1)

[2] [https://docs.julialang.org/en/v1/manual/metaprogramming/inde...](https://docs.julialang.org/en/v1/manual/metaprogramming/index.html#Code- Generation-1)

[3] [https://docs.julialang.org/en/v1/devdocs/ast/#Surface- syntax...](https://docs.julialang.org/en/v1/devdocs/ast/#Surface-syntax-AST-1)

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> This just now settles that anyone wanting to use Lisp to do anything practical has only one option: Clojure.

It's a shame, because Racket had the promise to be something really useful. Also throwing your dedicated 1% users under the bus, to attract 99% users who won't use your tool no matter what, is bad idea from a product management perspective.

I honestly feel f# has won the ML family language wars, and you won't be able to do much there. Even if you have decent ideas, you still have to solve the library problem. And yeah, given how scanty your user base is going to be, not many are going to write books either.

The fact that they even consider this idea seems shocking to me, let alone announce such a thing on a mailing list.

<comment><USER23> Calm down. They're not throwing anyone under the bus. The post starts with "No matter how Racket evolves, the community is committed to preserving what we have achieved: today's `#lang racket` programs will run in the future, and today's `#lang racket` modules can be used in future Racket programs".

Also, basically the point of Racket is solving "the library problem". Every fancy new language you make _in Racket_ has access to every library ever made with Racket.

<comment><USER22> >>"No matter how Racket evolves, the community is committed to preserving what we have achieved: today's `#lang racket` programs will run in the future

So to put it clearly, the current programs would run, but no new features, fixes and enhancements.

Basically you can't use it for anything production.

>>Every fancy new language you make in Racket has access to every library ever made with Racket.

Libraries, means more number of libraries for the same language. Not same number of libraries for more languages.

<comment><USER23> In Racket, it's the same thing. Racket #langs are interoperable. Which is why it's untrue to say "no new features, fixes and enhancements". Any improvements to the semantics of the language will be usable from both #lang racket and #lang racket2; any libraries written in #lang racket2 will be usable in #lang racket. This is merely a proposal for an official alternate _syntax_ , which you are entirely free to ignore. It doesn't take anything away from Racket to have this.

Bear in mind that Racket already comes with a plethora of officially supported #langs, many of them with highly non-lispy syntax. The ability to do this is a major part of Racket's unique value proposition in the first place.

<comment><USER24> At this point, it's not necessarily just an alternate syntax.

Given that, #langs _can_ be interoperable, and are encouraged to be, but not necessarily.

For a simple real-world example of interoperability problems, of the kind we could plausibly encounter between two very similar #langs... Consider that RnRS Scheme wants to use mutable lists, but modern Racket wants to use immutable lists. Code in the two #langs might even look almost identical, and even use the same names and calling conventions, but in practice you have trouble interoperating.

There's also factors like: what syntax is in the documentation everyone reads. If all the manuals people see are in a new syntax, the old syntax effectively becomes a dying language, whether or not it's still implemented.

With priorities and/or work, we can support a high degree of interoperability, as well as keeping the current syntax genuinely supported, but we shouldn't assume we get that for free. Nor should we assume it will happen, unless we make it a top requirement that's tracked and remains a consideration in every change.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> > _" From a community perspective, the rub is that the "many people" for > Racket syntax is a barrier are mostly people outside the community. It's > fair to ask who would benefit. It's difficult to ask a community to tackle a > problem whose solution targets a different community."_

Yeah no shit, alienating the 1% of the general population who uses your tool to appease to the 99% who don't currently use it might work sometimes, but you could just as easily lose that 1% and pick up jack shit, because the grassroots advocates for your language just evaporated. Dropping s-expressions from the primary lang would likely prove to be the kick in the ass I need to switch to CL.

(Other proposals listed sound a lot better. This syntax matter is my one serious grievance here.)

Edit:

> _" From what I've seen there is no advantage that editors can give you with > parens, that they can't do better without parens, given that you've written > loads of tests and done the grunt work to make that happen."_

This seems like one of those cases where lack of editor diversity among a lisp community once again threatens to cause trouble for anybody who doesn't use emacs (see also: terrible default REPL experiences because the devs all use racket-mode or geiser-mode.) What am I meant to replace the % command with when using vim or evil-mode? I don't want to do _" loads of gruntwork"_, nor do I wish to rely on editor extensions for a matter that should be so straight forward. I want to press % and jump to the matching paren.

</comment><comment><USER15> I think there are lessons to be learned from Python, Perl and Osborne [0].

New and arguably better things aren't created in a vacuum. They are perceived and judged in their context. Irritating users of A with A' can handicap the env of A as well as the env of A'.

I think this is often not thought about well enough.

[0] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Osborne_effect](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Osborne_effect)

<comment><USER15> related: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Path_dependence](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Path_dependence)

The evolution of projects and their environments is a difficult endeavor.

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> Forgive me if the answer to this is already widely-known, but at this point is Racket making a play to be a general-purpose, "batteries included" Lisp, rather than a stripped down tool for PLT stuff and making languages? It seems like there's room in the market for something like that. A _bit_ like Clojure, but without all of the big design commitments that Clojure makes, like the deep integration with Java and focus on immutability.

<comment><USER27> It's already been positioned as a batteries included lisp and arguably has had the best standard library offering + documentation for it of any lisp out there. This move has nothing to do with that, but rather the possibility of having less (to some) off-putting syntax.

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> Other comments make it sound like dropping parentheses is just a craven attempt to make Racket more popular. To me, this epitomizes the distinction that the maintainer drew between trying to get more popular, and lowering barriers of entry. If Racket 2 is no more popular (it loses as many community members as it gains), but the new community members had an easier time joining the community yet still love Racket 2 just as much as the old community loved Racket 1, isn't that still a win?

Conversely, if it turns out that everyone loved Racket 1 not because of the design elements that the maintainer put so much blood, sweat, and tears into, but because of the high barrier of entry due to the parentheses (the one thing that the maintainer _didn 't_ put effort into), how is that at all motivating to the maintainer?

I'm less of a community member and more of an admirer of Racket from a distance (and I don't mind parentheses, really, I've used Clojure professionally and it was great), but I look forward to seeing how this initiative turns out.

<comment><USER10> From some of the comments it feels like this is also intended as a way to research different ways of doing Lisp surface syntax without sacrificing the features of the macro system. I'm not sure if it's possible to do both at the same time.

<comment><USER28> Did you miss the "How?" section of the post? He wrote a research paper showing it was possible in 2012, "Honu: Syntactic Extension for Algebraic Notation through Enforestation".

<comment><USER10> Yes I read the paper, but he also makes it clear that there's still lots of work to do (e.g. how to make it work better with macros)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> Ignorant question: What's Racket's value proposition beyond being a well maintained Lisp?

What's this Language of Language thing, and is it so awesome that I'd be tempted to learn Racket only for it? Since otherwise its syntax and semantics might be too similar to say Python? (Assuming it drops all the Lispy stuff)

<comment><USER4> I look a few times to racket in the past. It's distinctive features are:

\- Pedagogy first: easy to learn, cute visual tutorial with support for desktop UIs, nice tutorials on the language itself and how to learn several aspects of programming such as sockets etc.

\- Very Easy to write a programming language on top of it by creating a new lisp reader (#lang) which transforms the given code and makes the access to the rest of racket's ecosystem very easy.

It is not industry-focused, therefore you might end up frustrated if your main/only goal is to write single web applications or you need good support for commercial libraries, databases etc. On the other hand in software everything is possible so you could always find your way to access those libraries and leverage the existing ecosyste,

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> Having followed this fairly closely, I will drop a though here while it is in my head. Surely there would be no obstacle to supporting s-expression syntax and allowing additional syntax around it. Everyone seems to see this as either-or, but is it really truly impossible to have a set of rules that say "you can't start a valid sexp with `(4` so this must be the start of an infix expression" and "you can start an sexp with `(add1` so I'll keep going"? Yes there will be a cost in the reader, but moving away from sexps is already going to be costly in that sense. Further, if we are going to incur the cost of a major complication of the parsing implementation, then why not go all out and allow interleaved expressions? What are the ambiguous cases that make this impossible?

<comment><USER26> I've always wondered if a good way to do infix would be to simply have the ability to mark an item with a character that means "move this to the front of the expression." Let's say the char is ":". Then this:

      (1 :+ 2)

Would be converted to this:

      (+ 1 2)

It would also allow for arbitrary placement, so you can do goofy stuff like pretend to be Forth without writing custom macros for the situation:

      (1 2 3 4 5 :+)

Whether or not that part is an advantage is another story ;)

This doesn't solve the "too many parens" problem, because you still have parens, but it does solve the "prefix math looks weird" problem. It's quite a bit simpler than what Dylan does, in that there's no special concept of "binary operators" and it's obvious at a glance how everything converts to sexps.

<comment><USER31> Racket currently has something like this for certain operators. `. -> . ` will allow the arrow to sit in between inputs and outputs in contracts.

<comment><USER25> > _for certain operators_

AFAIK it works for any operator that takes two operands (or more, but it makes less sense to be using it with three or more operands.)

e.g:

        > '(arg0 . operator . arg1 arg2)
        '(operator arg0 arg1 arg2)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> Surprised that he proposed infix operators since that is kind of contradictory to his stated goal of improving consistency within the language.

</comment><comment><USER33> FWIW, the angry negative responses to removing parenthesis from the community would be a much bigger obstacle to adoption than the parenthesis. Nothing is going to turn me away from a technology faster than a hostile community, especially for a programming language, where the ecosystem is both an important asset and an investment you make when you choose a language to write in.

And I'm serious: I adopted Go early on for it's ecosystem and community. Rust was harder _in part_ due to its early negative reputation for overzealous fanatics, which thankfully no longer feels like an issue (and the ecosystem is getting there, too.)

<comment><USER25> I'm not angry yet, I'm just concerned. If it actually happens, _then_ I'll be angry.</comment></comment>


iOS Keyboard Shows Movie and Dining Suggestions Based on Your Texts - <AUTHOR> http://chicagoinno.streetwise.co/2015/08/17/this-uiuc-born-ios-keyboard-shows-movie-and-dining-suggestions-based-on-your-texts/

<comment><USER2> "The [...] allows users to touch the "Porter Icon," and the app's [...] gives movie and restaurant information based on what you've recently texted."

At least the user clicking a button is explicit, so it seems like not all key strokes are send to their servers (which is against Apple's terms of service for third-party keywords afaik).</comment>


Embeddable Common-Lisp 16.0.0 RC1 available - <AUTHOR> https://mailman.common-lisp.net/pipermail/ecl-devel/2015-August/010913.html

<comment><AUTHOR> ECL (Embeddable Common-Lisp) is an interpreter of the Common-Lisp language as described in the X3J13 Ansi specification, featuring CLOS (Common-Lisp Object System), conditions, loops, etc, plus a translator to C, which can produce standalone executables.

ECL supports the operating systems Linux, FreeBSD, NetBSD, OpenBSD, OS X, Solaris and Windows, running on top of the Intel, Sparc, Alpha, PowerPC and ARM processors.

(source [https://common-lisp.net/project/ecl/](https://common- lisp.net/project/ecl/))</comment>


PyCon 2010 Videos Now Available - <AUTHOR> http://pycon.blip.tv/

<comment><USER2> Until the videos come online. Most of the presentations slides can be found here: <http://us.pycon.org/2010/conference/schedule/>

</comment><comment><USER3> So far only one video appears from 2010. The audio is great, much improved from last years audio.

<comment><USER4> I was going to comment on the bad audio; I've never watched PyCon before. (I didn't know Python this time last year.)

Are there transcripts of last year's bad-audio videos available somewhere?

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> I can't wait for these to be in iTunes and downloadable... Right now the podcast feed has some old stuff in it. I'm flying from HNL to LAX in a few days and would love to have some PyCon goodness to watch!

</comment><comment><USER6> the guy who didn't introduce himself at beginning I believe was Jacob Kaplan- Moss of Django

</comment><comment><USER7> Was there. One of the best PyCons so far.</comment>


Computational Category Theory - <AUTHOR> http://www.cs.man.ac.uk/~david/categories/ <comment><USER2> from a naive skim,it looks like a book that is about how to model category theory in SML.

A lot of the encodings seem to around that

I've over time gotten a lot out of efforts to model category theory in agda, one example being [https://github.com/copumpkin/categories](https://github.com/copumpkin/categories) (though theres many more).

<comment><USER3> Along those lines, any idea where I might find some good, minimal examples of category theoretic models implemented in a mainstream language? I have no doubt that strictly typed functional languages have a more convenient syntax for these concepts, and that translating those into Python, or even Java, would be difficult. But not impossible, and it might even help to illustrate why Haskell and ML are appealing choices to someone wanting to use these models in production.

<comment><USER4> In case Common Lisp is mainstream: [https://www.researchgate.net/publication/279847876_A_DSEL_fo...](https://www.researchgate.net/publication/279847876_A_DSEL_for_Computational_Category_Theory)

<comment><USER3> I appreciate this. Thanks!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> The pdf is from 2003, not clear whether much is dated later.

<comment><USER6> Curious, why does the date of the pdf matter? Not saying it applies here, but typically results in mathematics (unlike those in tech industry) do not become outdated and whatever is true today in mathematics is true tomorrow. So, for instance if you proven a mathematical theorem in 1661, then that theorem is still true today.

<comment><USER5> It doesn't except that it's standard to put the date in the link in HN if it's more than a year or so old.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Is the page layouting broken for anybody else? At least on my macOs Preview the top margin is nonexistent and the bottom margin huge.</comment>


Managing a Medical Record on the Blockchain - <AUTHOR> https://cryptoverze.com/managing-a-medical-record-on-the-blockchain/ <comment><USER2> The concept is sounds from a technical level. But having dealt with the industry Compliance is going to have a fit. After all you have bits of a patients data flying around a network that not easily trackable. Also in Step 3 - If the off network system is requesting the data from secure URL why block chain it all?</comment>


Curl and http/2 on Mac - <AUTHOR> https://daniel.haxx.se/blog/2016/08/01/curl-and-h2-on-mac/ <comment><USER2> Chrome disabled H2 over NPN a bit over a month ago, which led to many sites going back to H1.1 because most Linux distribution don't have an ALPN OpenSSL pkg (nginx is very easily static compiled with the latest OpenSSL src btw, no config needed). Secure transport doesn't seem to have ever supported either. It seems Apple has really been slacking in the past few years IMO. I'm sure they'll get around to ALPN eventually.

<comment><USER2> And I don't think I'm quite some ignorant hater[0], but they have been annoying lately, especially with iOS Safari.

[0] [https://i.imgur.com/cg4DBUT.jpg](https://i.imgur.com/cg4DBUT.jpg)

Edit: Apple is excellent with their hardware. That iPhone 4 was still charging with the plug like that..

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> For those who came here looking for the actual brew commands:

        brew install curl --with-nghttp2 --with-openssl
        brew link curl --force

You can also use --with-libressl instead of --with-openssl if you prefer LibreSSL.

<comment><USER4> Why might I prefer LibreSSL?

<comment><USER5> It's less bloated

<comment><USER6> How does bloat affect the end user?

I'd focus instead on how several more recent vulnerabilities with OpenSSL have not affected LibreSSL, and the code quality being improved with LibreSSL, hopefully resulting in fewer vulnerabilities in the future.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Tools like curl being available is one of the reasons I fell in love with development on Mac. I hope Apple takes note and ships curl (and other coreutils for that matter) in a way that continues to be developer friendly.

<comment><USER8> On macOS since 10.11, there is `nscurl`, which is a curl-like on NSURLSession where HTTP/2 is available.

<comment><USER9> Interesting. It doesn't have a man page, the help output gives no background info and there's very little information online. I'm curious to find out more about this tool.

<comment><USER10>
        nscurl -h

gives some useful info

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Another thing Secure Transport can't do is create a SecIdentityRef from an arbitrary cert and key pair, e.g. supplied as cURL command line arguments. This means you can't use client SSL certs with cURL on macOS or iOS unless you add the private key to the keychain, which you might not want to do. Or you can convert your x.509 cert and private key to a PKCS#12 archive because there is a public API for importing that ¯\\_(ツ)_/¯. You'll need OpenSSL to do the conversion though, because there isn't an Apple API for it, d'oh!

The decision to drop OpenSSL for Secure Transport IMO was not the best given it's lacking (public) API.

</comment><comment><USER12> curl on mac can't handle certain client certs, it requires them in PKCS12 (pfx) because of SecureTransport. A bit of a hassle at times.

</comment><comment><USER13> tl;dr Apple shipped curl without HTTP/2 support on their macOS, and the author of curl can do nothing about it.</comment>


Show HN: SMA and Per100k-normalized graphs of Covid-19 cases/deaths by country - <AUTHOR> https://covid-19-charts.net/ <comment><AUTHOR> Since daily COVID-19 figures in seem to vary wildly (owing to fewer cases counted at weekends, excessive cases counted after weekends, and ongoing corrections/adjustments), I built a tool to graph simple moving averages (e.g. 7-day-SMA, 30-day-SMA) of COVID-19 cases and deaths. This smooths things out and gives a clearer picture of general trends. The tool also allows you to normalize the same data per 100k people (to allow better immediate comparison between countries).

It uses the Johns Hopkins university data and updates automatically with the latest daily figures. I've got it running on an iPad in the corner of the room where it casts a warm, if somewhat miserable, glow on the room in the evenings.

Comments and feature suggestions welcome! Two features I already plan to add are:

\- implementing swipe left/right to flip through countries \- data for a couple of notable countries is missing - I will of course add them (I need to aggregate the data for those first, as John Hopkins are publishing the figures broken down by region for those)

</comment><comment><USER2> for some additional inspiration/features [https://kvas- it.github.io/coronatrack/](https://kvas-it.github.io/coronatrack/)

<comment><AUTHOR> This is an interesting resource. Though the amount of data being displayed is somewhat overwhelming (nature of the game, I suppose!).

I've instead tried to build something that a non-technical user might find very easy to use/understand. My goal was to keep it as simple as possible (as long as it provides value, of course).</comment></comment>


Nobel scientist Rita Levi-Montalcini dies, aged 103 - <AUTHOR> http://www.haaretz.com/jewish-world/jewish-world-news/jewish-italian-nobel-scientist-levi-montalcini-dies-aged-103-1.490888

<comment><USER3> Her longevity may not be an accident: [http://www.independent.co.uk/news/science/is-this-the- secret...](http://www.independent.co.uk/news/science/is-this-the-secret-of- eternal-life-1674005.html)

"Every day, she takes NGF in the form of eye drops"

<comment><USER4> Unfortunately, NGF seems to be more or less unavailable to the public.

<comment><USER3> I found the same thing, but lion's mane mushroom did come up

<http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/18758067>

I took an extract for a while and thought it might be doing something, but I didn't collect any data so it's hard to draw conclusions.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> It should be noted that, on balance, everything except physical health becomes better with age. Outside of degenerative aging, becoming older is so good that people are driven to apologism for the fact that aging cripples and kills them - they conflate being old and being aged, seeing two very different things as one, and a certain confusion arises after that point.

Consider how much better it will be to be older once we start being able to treat the root causes of the degenerative medical condition called aging. If you're not there yet, consider just how good being older must be in order for people to be able to say they are well off even while their health is crumbling.

[http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2012-12/uoc-- poa12031...](http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2012-12/uoc-- poa120312.php)

<comment><USER6> And, potentially, mental health - though the variance between people is huge. While my grandfather (mother's side) was mentally as sharp as he'd ever been when he died at 92 and my 94 year old grandmother (father's side) still plays bridge several times a week and has a fantastic memory for everything related to the family, it's also all too easy to find people who have been afflicted with dementia and alzheimer's from their 70s and 80s.

<comment><USER5> Mental health in that sense is physical health - age-related mental decline is caused failure in the physical processes of the brain. E.g. loss of blood vessel integrity, buildup of aggregates, diminished stem cell activity in response to rising cellular damage, etc.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Fred Beckey [1] has long been one of my heroes for how to age gracefully - <USER2> will turn 90 next month, and still climbs hard.

This article just gave me a new model for aging well. I turned 40 this month, and I feel more alive intellectually than I ever have. It is inspiring to think that I could continue to build on what I already know for another 60 years.

[1] - <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fred_Beckey>

</comment><comment><USER8> Everyone seems to focus on the fact that she was 103. That's not her greatest achievement. As a jewish woman she faced many obstacles in her career, was forced to work at home, immigrated to the US and finally discovered NGF, for which she won the Nobel prize. She was also a senator for life and a star scientist in Italy.

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rita_Levi-Montalcini>

</comment><comment><USER9> As I've aged, I've come to the conclusion that people become "old" more by choice than by the passage of time.

</comment><comment><USER10> She was involved in a scandal involving a drug called Cronassial, a pharmaceutical industry called Fidia and the Nobel committee. Through various donations, Fidia (at the time a small pharmaceutical company) used the scientist from 1975 onwards to market a new panacea drug called Cronassial (which was banned in the Nineties across Europe as it was linked to Guillain- Barré syndrome and possibly because of the human spongiform encephalopathy scare). The drug was approved thanks to the corrupt hand of Duilio Poggiolini (with the ministry of health) who was finally arrested in 1993. Fidia's "collaboration" with the scientist culminated in 1986 with the Nobel prize, for which Fidia seems to have corrupted at least one of the committee members with 8 million dollars [1], fact that came out during the Italian corruption trials in the first part of the Nineties.

It seems that Fidia's revenue jumped a 1000 folds thanks to Cronassial, apparently from 600 million Lire to 420 billion, with the drug representing 82% of the revenue, but I wasn't able to find a source for that.

It's quite unfortunate Levi-Montalcini never came clean of this scandal, refusing to comment on anything related to Cronassial and claiming ignorance of the facts.

Disappointing as all this might be, NGF is a great discovery which is well worth a Nobel prize and she seems to have been a very good scientist too.

1) Nilsson M. Nobel committee refutes allegations of corruption. Lancet 1995; 346: 763-4.

</comment><comment><USER11> This is a sad day. Everyone seems to be touched here in Italy.</comment>


Why Startup Hubs Work - <AUTHOR> http://paulgraham.com/hubs.html <comment><USER2> An interesting question is why 'physical' hubs work and why all those elements can't be captured yet online?

One key element to debate is randomness - pg does a good job I think in describing the value of randomness in terms of random meetings, shower thoughts - etc - There are many other examples of this process at work - e.g., in management/strategy: [http://www.management.wharton.upenn.edu/siggelkow/pdfs/SOart...](http://www.management.wharton.upenn.edu/siggelkow/pdfs/SOarticle.pdf)

It bears the question - what is this valued randomness in terms of social interactions? And how can we get it in online? Definitely not chatrulette :)

But not "hackernews" type of places either - because in here we are interacting in a very structured manner - on specific topics one chooses, etc - so it's not random - we are directing our thoughts, so we are not randomly exploring things.

How can we find that great balance that physical hubs have? Going to pick up dry cleaning you find a random guy and you say hi - because you have nothing better to do you end up chatting with the guy and discovering he's Sean Parker. But that won't happen online. You just switch to another browser window that is more interesting - no need for randomness.

Is the internet killing randomness? - Or better yet: how can we come up with something that gives that value to people in a way that is not chatrullette?? It should be random but within your comfort zone, in a way that is casual and not sought after (which is uncool and weird).

I wonder what you guys think.

<comment><USER3> Thanks to your comment, I just had a lightbulb moment.

The missing piece of the puzzle is real-time online location!

The reason we don't have chance meetings online is that we are not aware of who else is using or reading the same site or app as us in real-time. PG suggests that it maybe because of screen size, but I don't think that's the main problem. The real issue is that unless it's explicitly built into an app, like a chat site, we simply don't know who we are sharing that online space with at any specific point of time.

Imagine if you could say, "Oh I was reading this random blog on Tumblr and was surprised to see Fred Wilson reading it too. Didn't know he was into ASCII art, but had a good chat with him."

I can see Facebook doing this at some point. They are already doing it with music on their site. And they already know which of their users are on a particular site at any given time. It's just a matter of letting the users see that too and interact with each other. Turntable.fm is an outstanding example.

It's bound to freak people out, but it should actually make things more open and real-life like.

The problem of course is establishing true identity, and given that we can't literally see people to know it's really them, we will have to rely on a central identity system like Facebook. A decentralized method of identification would be great but is unlikely to happen.

<comment><USER4> > The missing piece of the puzzle is online location!

This is something that I think has, oddly enough, gone backwards as technology has improved. BBSs had a _very_ strong sense of location, while the internet is much flatter and amorphous, because everyone can connect to everything.

<comment><USER3> I think you misunderstood me. I mean real-time online location, as in I'm on news.ycombinator.com right now. My friend is on facebook.com right now. I'm not talking about geophysical location.

<comment><USER4> Oh I agree; I didn't mean that BBSs were tied to geographical location (though there was some of that), but that they provided a strong sense of online location. You were _on_ a particular BBS at a particular time, not on another one; and you couldn't have 30 tabs open to 30 different BBSs. If it was a multi-line board, you could see who was online at the same time as you. That sort of thing made it feel more like a virtual location.

<comment><USER3> I see. So I misunderstood you because I discovered the internet too late :-)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I don't want to argue too much about this, because I think Graham is probably right, but this footnote struck me:

 _[4] As I was writing this, I had a demonstration of the density of startup people in the Valley. Jessica and I bicycled to University Ave in Palo Alto to have lunch at the fabulous Oren's Hummus. As we walked in, we met Charlie Cheever sitting near the door. Selina Tobaccowala stopped to say hello on her way out. Then Josh Wilson came in to pick up a take out order. After lunch we went to get frozen yogurt. On the way we met Rajat Suri. When we got to the yogurt place, we found Dave Shen there, and as we walked out we ran into Yuri Sagalov. We walked with him for a block or so and we ran into Muzzammil Zaveri, and then a block later we met Aydin Senkut. This is everyday life in Palo Alto. I wasn't trying to meet people; I was just having lunch. And I'm sure for every startup founder or investor I saw that I knew, there were 5 more I didn't. If Ron Conway had been with us he would have met 30 people he knew._

This sounds a little bit to me about what it must sound like to hear Brad Pitt talk about getting lunch in LA.

I wouldn't make this observation, which I think is superficial, except that I'm surprised to see that Graham didn't mitigate it ("and it's not just because I'm Paul Graham; lots of companies we've funded that haven't even launched have reported the same experience").

<comment><USER6> You would be surprised. Probably because of the density of University Ave and the consistently great weather (with today as an exception) it's actually just incredibly common to run into people you know. On top of that people in Palo Alto are on average doing really amazing things.

<comment><USER5> Sure, I don't doubt it, I'm just saying it helps a lot to be among the more powerful people in the valley; the people you know that you run into are apt to be of a higher caliber.

Can I say again that I think Graham is probably right in this post?

<comment><USER7> He did mention that Ron Conway would have know even more people.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> Speaking as a nanoengineer now doing a web startup (in SF for 2 weeks now), this is just the way the world works.

Startups and nanoparticles can spontaneously form anywhere under the right environmental conditions, but they can just as easily break up in isolation. But if the local concentration is high enough, something magical happens. Even when a person or a molecule jumps ship, another one fills its place almost instantly. Suddenly, these things are "stable" but not only that, they can grow, sucking up bits from the surrounding environment and merging with others.

Critical mass, in SV it's the right kind of people, in nanoengineering it's the right kind of molecule, either way, once it gets going, you just hang on for the ride.

*<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Critical_micelle_concentration> is one nanoengineering example but there are others.

</comment><comment><USER9> I'm curious at Hacker News' thoughts on what it takes to start a startup hub.

For instance, here in Blacksburg, VA (Virginia Tech) a few local entrepreneurs and Angels are trying to get the startup community here off the ground. We've gone from little activity, to having a populated co-working space and regular meetups. The community is small and close; which is great for all those involved.

However, most companies that start here still aspire to move out to the Valley. The opportunities there still dwarf the opportunities here, and we're constantly in danger of losing what few founders we have.

Granted, Blacksburg isn't exactly a geographically optimal spot for techies to flock to. But is it possible that the larger hubs such as the Valley have too much pull for smaller communities to really take off?

<comment><USER10> I grew up in NC, lived in upstate NY and NYC, then Hawaii, and now the Bay Area. From my initial observations there are two things that set Silicon Valley apart:

1) Huge risk tolerance, and of a different sort than Wall St. The risk model of the startup ecosystem is different than for the banking system., in fact it's the inverse. Wall St. tends to chase returns (especially in trading, which has become a huge part of their revenues), and quarterly performance evaluations are even structured around that. But chasing ever larger returns based on leverage and debt entails ever more risk, exposing you to the possibility of catastrophic, systemic loss. The higher the return, the more exposure to company-ending loss.

In the startup world, many small bets are spread across many companies, 90% fail, 9% succeed somewhat, and perhaps 1% hit it big. But the ROI from that 1% more than makes up for all the small losses of the 90%.

Graphing the startup ecosystem ROI on chart would look like a line with a negative slope, punctuated by positive spikes. Whereas graphing the banking system's revenue would be inverse - a positive slope, punctuated by negative loss spikes.

Silicon Valley seems more comfortable with and tolerant of the periods of negative ROI than any other culture I've observed, supremely confident that the positive spikes _do_ happen, and that you don't even have to guess exactly where they'll come from as long as you play the odds and spread your bets. It's just an article of faith here.

2) Innovation pervades _everything_ , from academia, tech, and business, to social, even spiritual. By way of example, one of the first people I met here was a guy studying to be a Shamman. Anywhere else in the US, especially the east coast, such a thing might raise eyebrows, but here it's just par for the course - unbounded experimentation with anything and everything. For another example, is there anywhere else in the US that something like Burning Man could have become what it has? Doubt it. Innovation is universal here, not applied in some domains (tech) but stymied in others (social, spiritual), it's applied everywhere.

Those two also seem to reinforce each other. Risk tolerance begets innovation begets success begets risk tolerance begets innovation begets ...

Plenty of places have some degree of innovation, but I'm not sure there's anywhere it pervades culture to the extent it does here. That's one more big thing other startup hubs are up against.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> This is a good piece, but, this is well-trodden ground.

This is "economies of agglomeration", and it's basic urban economics. <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economies_of_agglomeration>

<comment><USER12> I didn't mean to suggest that no one realized it was helpful to be surrounded by a lot of people working on the same things. I've written about it a couple times myself. The surprises for me were in the details. E.g. that with startups, people are more willing to help out their peers than in more zero sum fields, and that you need that extra margin of help because startups fail by default.

<comment><USER13> "that with startups, people are more willing to help out their peers"

I'm going to guess that this happens in the entertainment industry as well. The similarity being that the person you are rooming with or working with who has a bit part on some show with you might be the next big star. So I would imagine people tend to be nice and helpful to people in any field where there is a big prize and it's not easy to tell (like with sports) who the next star or Spielberg might be. Because in addition to skill (which many have, as has been said with acting for example) there is luck and landing that key opportunity that launches your career. And if you happen to have known or have been friends with that successful person it could only help your career.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I remember writing about this for the BBC (to some British backlash) way back in January 2007, when Harj and I decided to leave London for the Valley.

<http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/business/6355289.stm>

Funny - I mention a chance encounter helping us a lot (meeting FB's head of data at a party), and then the vibe being optimistic and ambitious (and we were working out of the then Twitter office in South Park). We did also bump into Ron Conway one morning on the way back from kickboxing.

</comment><comment><USER15> For the last paragraph in that post, the Valley is different (from NYC,Boston etc) in that it is NOT the hub of anything else...other cities are metropolitan areas of various things going in in them...unlike valley, where there is only a very narrow band of activities that thrive...

<comment><USER12> Yes, that's true.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16>
        For example, you start a site for college students and you decide to move to the Valley for the summer to work on it. And then on a random suburban street in Palo Alto you happen to run into Sean Parker

I thought that was the fake movie story, and in real life Sean Parker went after Facebook, flying to Harvard to meet Zuckerberg and eventually convincing him to come to Silicon Valley.

<comment><USER14> I think the flying out to meet Zuck part is true, but it's also true that he later bumped into him that summer in Palo Alto (not sure if they'd stayed in touch).

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> A question for PG (or anybody willing to answer it):

Is there much difference between living in San Francisco and Palo Alto in terms of how much living/working there helps your startup?

And in these terms, is there any difference between Mountain View and Palo Alto?

<comment><USER12> SF and the peninsula are roughly equal. SF might be better if you want web designers, and the peninsula if you want database people.

Mountain View is cheaper than Palo Alto. Otherwise they're similar.

<comment><USER17> Thank you, Paul.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> > The second component of the antidote is chance meetings with people who can > help you.

This is the key. Stumbling into friendships with just a handful of amazing people will change your life by orders of magnitudes. There's a simple probability explanation:

Let's label the group of individuals who are in the top 10% of driven, creative people "Group X".

If Joe and Bob are both in Group X but never meet, their combined total output is 2.

If Joe and Bob meet and become friends, they multiply their output by 1.1 so their new combined output is 2.2:

Joe&Bob = 1.1(Joe + Bob)

2.2 = 1.1(1 + 1)

And exponentially it grows:

Joe&Bob&Sue = 1.1(1.1(Joe + Bob + Sue))

So you can literally calculate the expected value of Joe's output by simply calculating the probability that he will meet a Bob and a Sue and so on...

Joe's Expected Output = 1(1.1 * Prob(Meets Bob)) * (1.1 * Prob(Meets Sue)) ...

The probability of meeting driven, creative people in the Valley only has to be a tiny bit higher to see drastically different outcomes. It's a lot higher, and so we have orders of magnitude discrepancies.

</comment><comment><USER19> That's what Taleb explained for his living in NYC: it buys him the option of a Postitive Black Swan to meet great people ("antidotes"?): _This makes living in big cities [hubs] invaluable because you increase the odds of serendipitous exposure _ you gain exposure to the envelop of serendipity._ p209, The Black Swan, 2007. / _Taking maximum exposure to the positive Black Swan_ p207, _Seize any opportunity, or anything that looks like an opportunity. They are rare, or much rarer than you think. Remember that Positive Black Swans have a necessary 1st step: you need to be exposed to them_ p208

</comment><comment><USER20> > _In most places, if you start a startup, people treat you as if you're > unemployed._

This is why I think for places like NYC, London, etc (i.e. any financial capital) it will become increasingly difficult to create a startup culture. Being unemployed in those cities is NOT cool.

</comment><comment><USER21> Good explanation of benefits of being in a startup hub. However, are there advantages to being OUTSIDE a hub? I can think of at least two:

* Living and working outside a startup hub, you are more likely to encounter a problem nobody else has worked on before. In startup hubs, you have large number of startups working on small number of similar problems, while large chunk of profitable opportunities remain untapped. Why? Typical startup people don't encounter these problems. They are not talked about on startup blogs and you won't encounter that problem walking down University Ave in Palo Alto. In many cases, these opportunities are taken by old school, dinosaurs-like software firms who overcharge customers for their crappy software.

* Living outside a startup hub, you are exposed to users who are a good sample of the general population. This is not true for startup hubs, where users a lot more tech-savvy. While it seems at first that being surrounded by tech-savvy users is a good thing, this in fact may be a problem because building your startup based on feedback from these users may steer you in the wrong direction. You end up with couple of thousand "early adopters" who are enthusiastic about your product, but you are not able to expand further because your product just doesn't resonate with a true average user. On the other hand, if you can get a true average user to be your early adopter, the feedback you get from them will help you make a product which is attractive to a large number of users.

Of course, hubs are way overrepresented in the past success stories. However, more startups are started in the hubs, so it's not clear how actual success rates compare. I would love to see some stats for that.

<comment><USER5> A third issue here is that talent is cheaper in (say) MSP than in SJC/SFO. Like, a lot. It's easier to hire and easier to retain. Because locales are sticky, the level of talent available to you is likely to be comparable or better than you'll get in the valley.

Your point about the "general population" is well taken too, especially if you're a company selling to other businesses. Most of the big companies in SFBA, and most of the companies you'll talk to period if you HQ out there, are software companies. Selling software to software companies is hard. Whereas if you HQ in Atlanta, you've Home Depot, UPS, Coca Cola, big banks, and so on.

There is clearly a kind of startup that benefits from being in SFBA so I don't want to sound like I'm saying there's nothing to this "startup hub" thing.

<comment><USER21> Actually I disagree about your "cheap talent" remark. When you are building a scalable startup, looking for cheap labor is not a good idea since it's a part of "fixed cost" you have. Moreover, you don't need that many developers nowadays to build a startup. You only need a couple really good developers, and you want to either pay them really well or have them as your co-founders. (disclaimer: I'm a programmer myself).

<comment><USER5> You're not following. Broadly speaking, better talent costs more money. The more money you have to spend on talent, the better the talent you retain will be. It's not about looking for "cheap labor"; it's about being able to find, recruit, and retain better people.

Think of it as a market inefficiency (albeit one that is difficult to "fix"): the stickiness of people's locales prevents them from maximizing their opportunities and decreases demand for their services in SFBA and increases their supply in (say) MSP.

<comment><USER21> In other words, you want to hire in places where there's a large pool of good developers, but few employers competing for them. Am I following you now?:)

<comment><USER5> Correct.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> The Internet is the biggest startup hub of them all. IRC, topic specific mailing lists, places like HN, etc.

99% of all good ideas in computer security were discussed on the cypherpunks list in the 1990s. I'm sure there are or were other subculture groups online equally useful.

</comment><comment><USER23> As the low hanging fruit disappear, the type of veteran knowledge each entrepreneur requires will change.

Right now issues like effective user interface are being solved and are general enough across disciplines/markets that the results can be shared by everyone for everyone. But as internet startups specialize in finer and finer ways, focusing their products and services on smaller and smaller niches, the struggling entrepreneur will require an equally specialized knowledge. Startup towns have been ideal for sharing the knowledge of how to run an internet startup, but when that knowledge becomes more common and less geographically constrained, I'd wager we'll see Sector Specific regions ascending.

</comment><comment><USER3> Tiny typo: "from being the business" should probably be "from being in the business".

<comment><USER12> Thanks; Freudian slip...

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> When I meet people from the Valley they tend to talk how my startup might succeed and the interesting directions we could take. Conversely when I meet startup people from London (where I'm based) who haven't been to the Valley they tend to talk about why my startup might fail, usually focusing on competitors. Both are useful to talk about, but I think this reflects the optimism/cynicism divide between the Valley and everywhere else.

We said we'd move to the Valley if we were accepted to YC this winter, but I think the culture over there might be reason enough to do it regardless.

</comment><comment><USER25> Even though this essay has tried to capture how technology startup hubs work and SF in specifc , but this is how every every other hub works . Let it be finance(Wall street),cinema(Hollywood),art(Florence).All these have similar couterparts accross the world. My thesis is, it has more to do with the people who first come and establish a successful enterprise and develop a culture that attract more people .Something like how people were attracted to the gold rush(this had more to do with luck than talent) And also the presence of supporting infrastructures.Presence of Stanford, Berkeley,etc. Stanford almost has a symbiotic relationship with the valley.

And it should not be of any surprise in any kind of hub ,that even if collaboration does not happen abetment will happen. Purely because of the large presence of like minded people.

One good thought experiment would be to think of former hubs that have lost their culture. Thinking of that,I realize only hubs formed around matter (cities that sprang up around mines and oil wells) have been lost while those that rose on ideas will stay for a long time thriving with life,hope and innovation.

PS: I am a little surprised that PG notes that he meets so many techie people in his day to day life.

</comment><comment><USER26> Another reason and a big reason seems to be past success, you need people with capital to invest. Once an area gets a couple large companies to cash out not only do those people tend to invest or start companies in similar industries but people around them see their success and want in on the action. If Groupon has a successful IPO and enough employees cash out Chicago could very well become the next large hub. This is the reason why you need a physical hub, but I think AngelList might be removing that hurdle.

On the same note, the investors, lawyers, and employees in startup hubs have 'standard terms' where as in other parts of the country the terms get extremely complicated with things such as tranches. They understand what it takes to succeed since they've usually done it before and are there to guide the company.

</comment><comment><USER27> I'm a grad student in City and Regional Planning, and taking a Geographic Information Systems class. I need to submit a proposal for a final project, and was thinking of doing some kind of analysis relating to startup hubs. I'd probably borrow some ideas from this essay -- looking at population and demographic metrics (numbers/density), the historical presence of startups and higher ed in an area (environment), walkability and the presence of something like "cafe culture" (chance). I'd hope that the analysis partly aligns with existing hubs, and perhaps suggest some

If anyone has any ideas for a data source to look at besides census data, Crunchbase, and maybe national chain cafe store locators, give a shout. pg??? I'd obviously share the report...

</comment><comment><USER28> I see two reasons why you should be in the Valley:

1\. You sell to startups 2\. Your business model is cash flow negative, or you don't have a business model at all

If neither is the case, a "second tier" hub like Austin or Santiago (Startup Chile) will do fine with lower salary costs.

</comment><comment><USER29>
      "Having people around you care about what you're doing is an extraordinarily
       powerful force. Even the most willful people are susceptible to it."

Stupid idea, but may be, AA style support groups are needed. "Anonymous Entrepreneurs?"

<comment><USER17> That's what the Hackers & Founders meetups are for.

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> Paul's written before on the uniqueness of the valley.

A key that America has is her ability to allow for iterative steps ( which often pose as failure ) before a great idea can execute commercially. Other countries seemingly have deeper social stigma associated with failing and philistine impatience. This could be changing though at rates faster than perceived within the valley.

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Renaissance> is a great study. In particular, characteristics asymptotic re innovation.

" They say that coming events cast their shadows before " - Ada, countess of Lovelace

</comment><comment><USER31> I was actually having a conversation about this recently. A few of us were talking about how startups are almost "normal" here (Waterloo), so it doesn't seem odd to work 9am-10pm. But when you go home, people think you're crazy.

It's that subconscious influence that makes it so hard elsewhere. If enough people tell you that you're crazy, it takes a really special person to be able to shrug it off. I think the interesting thing here is that having a great co- founder has a very similar effect. I would even go as far as to say startup hubs and co-founders play a very similar role in keeping you going.

</comment><comment><USER32> Paul (or anyone else), in note 3 you say _"Starting a company is common, but starting a startup is rare. I've talked about the distinction between the two elsewhere..."_

I'd appreciate any links to the places you've mentioned this.

<comment><USER33> One of the best descriptions: [http://steveblank.com/2010/01/25/whats-a- startup-first-princ...](http://steveblank.com/2010/01/25/whats-a-startup- first-principles/)

"...a startup is an organization formed to search for a repeatable and scalable business model."

<comment><USER34> So was the first McDonald's a startup?

<comment><USER33> It was when Ray Kroc took it over and wanted to build a nationwide chain, instead of run a single restaurant.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> _"Having people around you care about what you're doing is an extraordinarily powerful force."_

Hit the nail on the head, explains exactly why I'm hungry for a mentor, even more so than an investor, enough though my savings is running out.

One thing I've realized why pg is so insightful is because he thinks really hard by digging in deep, about questions that most people don't spend more than a few minutes thinking about after saying, "hmm. that's interesting." Most people don't spend more brain-cycles after that obsessing over it.

Lesson learned: really really obsess over your area of interest, your craft :)

</comment><comment><USER36> One could jump start one's thinking on this subject by reading Edward Glaeser's "Triumph of the City: How Our Greatest Invention Makes Us Richer, Smarter, Greener, Healthier and Happier" (Reading Jane Jacobs seminal works can only help, too.)

"Cities, the dense agglomerations that dot the globe, have been the engines of innovation since Plato and Socrates bickered in an Athenian marketplace."

He also has section in the book assessing the "Rise of Silicon Valley", and makes the point the "innovation clusters in places like Silicon Valley because ideas cross corridors and streets more easily than continent and seas." And he points out an amazing correlation of the geographic proximity of patent citations. "...even in our information age, ideas are often geographically localized."

As the NYT book reviewer of Glaeser's work put it... "Greater density is the goal: more people means more possibility."

Ergo, a greater density of people working in similar modalities means a greater possibility of achieving within those modalities. It also means that those working in other modalities can encounter difficulty getting support, especially when directly competing for resources with the dominant modality. (I.e., startups v financial services industry for programmers.)

What's different about NYC is that there are so many people in great density, that it's still possible to have vibrant secondary modalities that may never supplant the (multiple) dominant ones. It also means that there may be cross fertilization between modalities not possible in other innovation clusters.

What's different about Silicon Valley is that it's a "city" with a single dominant modality - tech (currently Internet) innovation & startups. You can walk entire blocks in NYC without running into someone involved in a tech startup, or go days without talking tech at a social engagement. That is almost unpossible in SV. So SV's advantage over NYC's shear density of people is a density of people operating in the same modality.

Lastly, there are many geographically distributed innovation clusters/startup hubs that each operate in a different modalities. PG is understandably writing about the types that occur in Silicon Valley, because that's what he's most familiar with. And, they produce undeniable, and very public, results!

</comment><comment><USER37> _chance meetings with people who can help you_

That's why I so much wanted to come to startup school... I was denied, and apparently there isn't a waiting list..? (or, I was also denied the waiting list).

But why not organize another sort of event: a "chance meeting machine" where you would come to some place during a weekend and have many opportunities to meet interesting people. Many different events, maybe all around town.

A Startup school without the "class" part, and therefore with a much less strict numerus clausus.

</comment><comment><USER38> To me, hacker news is my startup hub.

I have chance encounters all the time with people who have interesting knowledge about startups and startup tools that could help me.

There is a huge social group who don't think starting a startup means being unemployed. The numbers are certainly on my side at hacker news.

At hacker news, starting a startup is both fashionable and reasonable.

I'm just a lurker, but already I get huge benefit. My guess is that people who interact a lot get even more benefit.

What does San Francisco have that hacker news doesn't?

</comment><comment><USER39> _If you look at a list of US cities sorted by population, the number of successful startups per capita varies by orders of magnitude._

Silicon Valley has a larger concentration of startups per capita, as people from around the country go there to try a startup. As such, I'm sure it also has a higher number of failed startups per capita. Instead of looking at absolute numbers, the chance that a given startup will succeed is the key metric.

</comment><comment><USER22> "willingness to help people out" would seem to suggest NYC, LA, and DC will be forever handicapped. NYC seems to be overcoming this through bei great in other ways, but LA/entertainment culture seems the antithesis of startup culture, although both constantly create new things from ideas.

This all makes thhe demise of Boston even more stark and sad. It had every advantage except weather!

<comment><USER40> I'm curious why you think there has been a "demise of Boston". Is it really no longer a first-class "startup hub"? NYC gets more hype these days but it seems like both are great places to do a startup.

<comment><USER22> Outside biotech, it has gone from number 1 to a solid number 2 to mid-list. Seattle, Austin, Portland, NYC, and Boulder are all above it for many types of startups -- Boston has some legacy VCs, great but declining universities, and big city air travel and other infrastructure, but it is getting weaker by the day as a place to base a startup.

I don't really have time to put together statistical backing for my argument, but based on talking to a bunch of new startups in security tech, it is definitely an anti Boston trend.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER41> What I'd like to explore, is if you can help catalyze the effect PG is talking about by concentrating whatever startup activity exists in a city to one central location. In other words can you fake a hub, and thereby encourage its growth, by 'artificially' concentrating this critical mass of people?

</comment><comment><USER42> I wonder if an app that would let you list the one thing you need right now to move your project along would help... it would make the chance meeting phenomenon an internet occurrence, which seems like it would greatly facilitate finding that one person.

</comment><comment><USER43> I hazard that one of the reasons founders are so helpful to each other is simple karma. Just like contributors to open source and developers who blog to share what they've learned.

</comment><comment><USER44> Does anyone have any statistics on the success rate of startups in Silicon Valley versus elsewhere? It would be interesting to see some data that supports pg's claim.

</comment><comment><USER45> I think the world has changed drastically in the past few years...

I can provide perspective from working for a startup in SF in 06-07 and a startup in Chicago now... In Chicago noone thinks you're unemployed if you say you work for a startup. That was the case a couple of years ago, but with Groupon and a TON of other companies that just isn't the case. The difference is just that more people are doing startups in SF vs. consultants/bankers/fortune 500 workers... Go to a bar here and girls think it's so damn cool that you are running a startup (apparently girls are obsessed with all things geek - [http://www.chicagobusiness.com/article/20110924/ISSUE03/3092...](http://www.chicagobusiness.com/article/20110924/ISSUE03/309249987?template=printart)).

Re: the coffeshop thing- just by chance (ie we didn't know this going in and it is NOT the startup hub area within Chicago), within 3 blocks of FeeFighters office are: 37signals, SproutSocial, Threadless, Crowdspring, and several other startups. I don't see how it helps us significantly to bump into them (though we have helped our neighbors when they've had merchant account issues). Many people think it is a wasteland anywhere not the valley but I have seen that not to be the case here, in New York, and even in Pittsburgh.

So what is the difference between here and there? The largest differentiator I've noticed between the valley and elsewhere is funding. We raised most of our money in Chicago from VC's we really like, but could have raised easier on the west coast. A lot of top VC's prefer to have you close and told us flat out they would fund us if we moved there. We had term sheets dependent on us being in Austin, SF, and LA. I don't think it has had an effect one way or another on our business thus far.

Startups need money, and often flock to where it is. Things are changing all over the place though (Rich people in Chicago all of a sudden want to fund startups, will be interesting to see if that continues post-Groupon IPO)

It also depends on your type of business. If you sell mainly to startups, you should probably be in the valley.

<comment><USER46> West coast VCs are aggressively investing three thousand miles away from the valley in NYC. I'm sure being geographically closer to VCs makes it easier to raise money, but I really hope startups don't pick their location based on where VCs are. There are better parameters to optimize for.

I encourage startups to base their businesses where they'll have the best chance at recruiting the best talent. The next search engine would be well- served starting in the valley, especially if it's an ex-Google team. Similarly, storage companies continue to thrive in and around Boston, as they can draw talent from EMC. New media startups with a heavy emphasis on design- as-differentiator do really well recruiting in NYC.

By this reasoning, it might even make sense to base your web startup in Florida, _if_ your network high-quality development talent is in Florida. I've seen this approach work well in unusual startup geographies, especially when it's a leader of an ex-team that is getting his or her band back together for second (or third) time.

Pick a geography that will play to your recruiting strengths.

<comment><USER47> Aggressively investing? That wording suggests to me that VCs are actively cold-calling or spamming companies with indications of interest. I assume you don't actually mean this.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER48> Next to drugs, the strongest predictor of imminent mental illness in a healthy person is a move caused by adverse economic circumstances (such as having to sell one's house, or move to a new city because there are no jobs). Moving scares people, especially after 25.

What the Bay Area and New York have in technology is an environment where (at least for now) people can bounce back from job loss (a likely eventual outcome of a startup) quickly and without having to move halfway across the country. I think this is a _big_ motivator. Startups can thrive in the Bay Area because a person whose startup fails can find a good job shortly afterward, _without_ having to move to another city.

Also, startup generation is a nonlinear function of the desire to launch them, because of the need to find co-founders and investors.

<comment><USER5> It's like that now, but when my SF startup failed in 2001 and I had to look for a job at the end of the bubble, it was extremely stressful --- and I'm guessing I had an easier time looking for jobs than most of my last-bubble cohort.

Continuing the same point: it is in fact not all that stressful finding tech jobs in any major metro area now. I'm in Chicago, we have offices in NYC (our HQ) and Mountain View, and it's hard to hire in _all three_ places.

I'm sure there's a grain of truth in what you're saying, that SF can accumulate talent because talent moves there expecting the red-hot market in the area to mitigate risks. But things can turn quickly.

</comment></comment><comment><USER49> Interesting, this reads like an anecdotal description of the New Trade Theory.

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Krugman#New_trade_theory> <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Trade_Theory>

</comment><comment><USER50> Is Silicon Valley really a hot bed of startups? Let's see:

People do 'startups' border to border in the US, in communities tiny to huge. Those startups might be a pizza carryout, electrical engineering company, franchised fast food restaurant, white tablecloth restaurant, law firm, CPA tax firm, auto body shop, photo studio, boutique dress shop, Web site design and programming firm, big truck/little truck product supplier, etc. Yes, Silicon Valley has a high concentration per capita of venture funded information technology startups, but there are startups all over the US.

Do the venture funded information technology startups really need a very special environment to keep going?

Let's see: An auto body shop, white table cloth restaurant, or even a lawn mowing service need more expensive capital equipment than an information technology startup. E.g., just a lawn mower can cost $13,000, enough to buy parts enough to plug together 10 good servers. A Web design firm anywhere in the US, or the world, has nearly all the same software challenges as a venture funded social Web site in Silicon Valley.

Does Silicon Valley really have a big advantage on the best creative work?

Let's see: Let's look at some of the best creative work in, say, music: How did Stradivari and Guarnieri build their violins, Vivaldi, Bach, Mozart, Beethoven, Mendelssohn, and Paganini write for violin, Heifetz get started in violin all in really small communities where what they were doing was astoundingly rare and world class on an historic level? I mean, who the heck was Mozart going to go to for help on how to write interesting, novel harmony? Where was Bach going to learn about key modulations? Who gave Mozart the crucial help he needed to write his operas or Bach to write his organ pieces or his violin 'Chaconne'? No one.

Who helped Newton with optics, calculus, the law of gravity, and the second law of motion?

Who helped Watt with the steam engine?

The history of the best works in art, science, engineering, and technology is awash in people doing historic world class work in what in Silicon Valley would look like near total isolation.

So, (1) startups happen all over the US and (2) much of the best work in all of history happened in near isolation. So, Silicon Valley is not needed for either startups or good work.

There's another candidate reason for the high per capita concentration of venture funded information technology startups in Silicon Valley: On average and in nearly all cases, the venture partners have at best meager qualifications in anything technical yet have to justify their risky investments to their general partners and limited partners.

Their best justification is, may I have the envelope please? Thank you. Here is it: "Join the herd!" So, get a place on Sand Hill Road or nearby and do much like everyone else does. So, 'fit in'. Talk to each other a lot like gossip among middle school girls.

So, net, what Silicon Valley has a high concentration of is not really startups but just venture funded information technology startups, and the reason is not that Silicon Valley is an especially good place for the entrepreneurs to get the work done but just that the venture funding is concentrated there because the venture partners do not have the qualifications to evaluate projects on their own and, instead, get along by fitting in and joining the herd. Net, the concentration is due to the propensity of venture partners to form herds.

Once again I'm glad for US national security that the Silicon Valley venture partners are not DARPA, NSF, or NIH problem sponsors.</comment>


MIT Cheetah Robot Bounds Off Tether, Outdoors - <AUTHOR> http://spectrum.ieee.org/automaton/robotics/robotics-hardware/mit-cheetah-robot-bounds-off-tether-outdoors#.VBcJWVXTLRA.hackernews <comment><USER2> The bounding part is very cool (I caught myself leaning forward in surprise [and mild horror?] as the machine jumped over the box instead of maneuvering around it). Besides not requiring fuel, does anyone know how this is different/better/unique than Google/BostonDynamic's WildCage? ([https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wE3fmFTtP9g](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wE3fmFTtP9g)) I certainly agree that more people working on this is a good thing, but I'd like to understand the progress being made.

</comment><comment><USER3> I just can't help but get the feeling that those robots like this, like Boston Dynamics dogs and their cheetah, especially ASIMO and others resembling those, are mere "medieval automatas" ([http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automaton#Medieval_automata](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automaton#Medieval_automata)) of our age. They lack something fundamental, maybe even as fundamental as shift from clock gears to digital processors.

<comment><USER4> It's lasers.

Or you may be referring to something like the _uncanny valley_ [1] phenomenon; you're unsatisfied with the comparison to the subject of their mimicry, in this case a cheetah. Some lasers would probably help with that.

[1] [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uncanny_valley](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uncanny_valley)

<comment><USER5> How many lasers do real cheetahs have?

<comment><USER6> Zero, which is why lasers would help — moving leftward (i.e. more machine- like) is one of the three ways out of the uncanny valley.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> It doesn't really _look_ that impressive. Sure, the tech probably is very advanced, but the gait just looks silly and quite far from the "elegance" of fast land animals. While the article does imply that "getting from bounding to galloping is not that hard", I don't think it is that easy either or they would have done it already.

<comment><USER8> I think that's mainly because small animals don't generally walk like that when they're going slow.

<comment><USER9> exactly, animals tend to use the most energetically efficient form of locomotion for a given desired speed (walking vs. running for example). i'm not sure that bounding is more efficient than either walking or galloping at any speed, since more energy seems to go into vertical and rotational motion than those more common forms of locomotion.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> I suppose people working on such projects don't think of their creations as "scary as fuck"? Because that is exactly what I think when I see an _effective_ dog-like robot. I cannot help but imagine, for example, that in the future, campus shootings will be replaced by campus robots hunting down students and faculty (due to malicious programming)! Is the fear I feel that irrational, founded only on Hollywood movies in which mankind always ends up fighting the rise of AI?

Also, (before software and hardware eat the world, literally) I don't think the capitalistic structure + unbridled automation is a stable combination. Because those who own the capital will always prefer an uncomplaining and efficient worker, the robot, to a human being 9 out of 10 times. And those who own their labour are, well, outdated. The pace of automation is beyond unprecedented; it is incomprehensible.

<comment><USER11> Scary? That thing is awesome. And totally not threatening. It would be able to hunt you for 10 minutes and then run out of battery. If it does catch up to you, you can always go up a stairs, or just kick it over.

AI is of course a serious concern. But this isn't AI, it's a robot.

<comment> rkuykendall-com > In labs everywhere, experimental robots would leap up from lab benches in a > murderous rage, locate the door, and—with a tremendous crash—plow into it > and fall over.

> Those robots lucky enough to have limbs that can operate a doorknob, or to > have the door left open for them, would have to contend with deceptively > tricky rubber thresholds before they could get into the hallway.

[https://what-if.xkcd.com/5/](https://what-if.xkcd.com/5/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> one of the reasons robots like this look so unnatural is that they're trying to locomote entirely using active control (i.e., the controller tries to calculate the correct position and force continuously) with rigid limbs.

animal systems have passive-dynamic components (e.g., spring-mass-damper) that smooth out discontinuities and inherently self-corrects for many unanticipated situations. robots that incorporate passive elements (and this robot just might have some, it's hard to tell from 30 secs of video) would look more natural and have better self-stabilization.

<comment><USER5> Your first paragraph says "robots like this" then your second paragraph backpedals since you don't know if this robot has significant passive dynamics or not. Why not look it up instead of hedging?

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> This is very very impressive. Stable dynamic gates over even moderately bumpy terrain are Hard. Jumping is also hard and the last company to get a solid electrically powered robot to jump for bought by Google. The tricky thing though is _heat_. If they aren't doing active cooling then the robot will only have a few minutes of runtime. In contrast to some other commentors I think if they wanted this guy to move smoothly they could do so with this hardware, instead however they are aiming for speed.

</comment><comment><USER13> Reminds me a lot more of a sheep than a cheetah, but still, very impressive work. It must be an incredible feeling to see something like that come to fruition.

</comment><comment><USER14> Nicely done. I'm sure it is pretty fun to debug. All my walking robot experiments (mostly with RC servos) have had some pretty hilarious not- actually-walking moments when the gait software gets confused :-) Should be interesting to see what additional work comes out of this lab.

</comment><comment><USER15> I love that lady in the background on her phone, carrying on normally. Groundbreaking technology running around on the quad at MIT. No big deal.

</comment><comment> at-fates-hands I would argue the Pronghorn Antelope is actually a better model to replicate since Cheetah can only maintain their speeds over short distances - as opposed to the Antelope which can maintain their 60mph speeds over much greater distances due to their larger hearts and lungs.

<comment><USER16> The technological problem of power density vs. limbs and the control of the limbs seem fairly separate to me. If we had 10 times more efficient batteries, this would simply run ten times further without any other changes. Unless the bottleneck here is heat dissipation in the motors, but even that would be way easier to fix than our battery problems.

</comment></comment><comment><USER17> It's so much quieter than the gas powered Boston Dynamics robots! Bringing the volume level down is essential to many use cases, so it's good to see this work.

</comment><comment><USER18> Can it turn?

<comment><USER19> On it's owner? Terrifying. Oh, you meant directionally..

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> Better start stocking up on EMP grenades and GEP guns...

</comment><comment><USER21> I'm disappointed. I was expecting to see a video of MIT students chasing after a robot that escaped from the lab.

</comment><comment><USER22> would be amazing if they elaborate on the open source components

</comment><comment><USER23> did anyone else find the background music inappropriate and distracting from the awesome research and results?

<comment><USER24> Fixed.

[http://www.youtubemultiplier.com/541727ed9d419-skynet3rewfsd...](http://www.youtubemultiplier.com/541727ed9d419-skynet3rewfsdfsdfsdf.php)

Fullscreen the left video for complete experience.

</comment></comment><comment><USER25> Cheetahs today, Skynet tomorrow.</comment>